Why, start a fire, of course! Surely, only lunatics would use fire as a tool to promote the idea of reducing combustion to bring CO2 levels down to 350ppm. And yet, here we have it. From earth350.org where they write:
Australia Ignites For Climate Action…
If you haven’t yet seen the incredible photos out of Australia for 350 EARTH, you’re missing out.
First up is this gorgeous aerial, with the snaking highway behind it:
The design–which incorporates a windmill as a sign of clean energy alternatives–was made by Keith Chidzey.
The next photo is of a similar design, engulfed in flames.
The piece, which was photographed by acclaimed photographer Peter Solness, was designed to call attention to the issues of drought and wildfire in Australia.
While prolonged drought and bushfires a continuing crises in Australia, the problems (and their solutions) have never before been depicted so evocatively. Enormous thanks to Keith, Peter, and everyone else who helped create this beautiful piece.
==============================================================
Umm, the drought is over in Australia in case you 350.org folks haven’t noticed.
And I can’t help noticing how the second photo from above, doesn’t look that much different than this one:
I suppose it makes some sort of sense, as both events do tend to attract the same sort of firebugs filthy eco hippies artists people.
From the Wikipedia entry they say that for the 2010 event, “BLM issues 293 citations and 8 arrests.” BLM is the Bureau of Land Management.
I wonder if the earth350.org kooks got burn permits? I wonder if they restored the land to its previous state before torching it?
h/t to Ecotretas
Ridiculae, for sure.
They’re idiots all right.
Look at the fires throughout the world, every day … And see where they all aare for the most part. Satellites know … Fire Mapper — http://firefly.geog.umd.edu/firemap/
Most of the fire are agricultural or land clearing operations in thrid world countries. Charcoal production figure big in the totals. I wonder why no one tracks this destruction daily.
“Surely, only lunatics would use fire as a tool to promote the idea of reducing combustion to bring CO2 levels down to 350ppm.”
wOw!
I wouldn’t trust those brainiacs with a rollerskate key. Things would undoubtedly go south in ways I could never imagine if they ever got their hands on one.
Lewis and Clark reported acres and acres of NATURALLY-BURNING coal fields in North Dakota when they paddled by going upstream in 1803.
Over one hundred years later, those same underground NATURAL fires are still burning in the shallow coal fields underneath South Dakota, North Dakota, Montana. More fires are burning in China. Tundra fires have smoldered for hundreds of years in Siberia.
And all of that energy is wasted.
(There are an admitted number of human-incurred underground fires – primarily in abandoned mines and other near-surface coal layers that were started by trash fires and surface forest fires. But none compare to those natural fires above.)
We are made guilty by the forest fires, by brush fires, and by “so-called clear-cutting. But every kilogram of carbon in forests and brush worldwide has grown back AFTER fires that had previously cleared every acre of forested land. Further, every dead tree now “decaying naturally” emits the same mass of CO2 (just a bit slower) that burning emits. Forest fires are a natural requirement of forests.
We should never “encourage” them nor ignore them. But the enviro’s pretty campaigns best serve the enviro’s only (as usual) and seldom address the real problems. But they do make their enviro sponsors feel better.
tarpon says:
December 1, 2010 at 4:19 pm
Allow the poor economical energy worldwide, and the poor you decry for making charcoal would only need it for their hamburgers. On football weekends.
But, until then, are you going to deny them permission to burn wood also? Are you going to kill them with your policies?
I’m switching from electrical heating to a wood fire this winter because electricity is now too expensive.
Well, at least they didn’t explode skeptical children.
I wonder if they restored the land to its previous state AFTER torching it?
Huh.
It gets better: http://www.smh.com.au/environment/energy-smart/sydney-to-go-it-alone-as-power-producer-20101201-18gr8.html
The Lord
MayorGoofball of Sydney, Clover Moore, has decided that she will fight those noxious, carbon emitting coal-fired power stations with natural gas burning power stations.racookpe1978 says:
“And all of that energy is wasted.”
Naaah – it’s helping to keep us warm. And, incidentally, preventing the next Ice Age.
The poor need development for better efficiency,cleaner environment, and proeper use of resources, if it take a village Nuke reactor so be it, but the holier than thou watermelons, who go to bed at night fearing healthy, happy, prosperous, dark skinned people are at the helm of NGO’s like 350, 1010, etc.
Hanging all the kelptocrats would be a good start…
In Australia no one is ever keen to declare the end of a drought, especially if drought status is linked with farm subsidies. But wow the story down under is the most marvellous La Nina (IOD) wet. North (Darwin), East and South-East it has been a remarkably wet spring and also fairly cool…just read the stories http://www.weatherzone.com.au/news/
Some of the groups hyping 350 initially made the mistake of holding rallies and other types of events which would only look remotely impressive if you had lots of people involved. The slide shows on The Guardian website for a couple of years therefore included an awful lot of carefully cropped pictures of about a dozen people sadly huddling together in each location .
One of the rare wide shots one year was in, I think, a Scandinavian city square. True it had dozens, if not a hundred or more, people in the picture, but closer inspection revealed that most of them were passers-by wondering what the hell was going on.
Sensibly, more of these groups now restrict themselves to gestures which can, as in this case, produce a superficially impressive picture without blowing the gaff that they have virtually no supporters.
Did they have to perform an environmental impact study?
Just like the Hollywood types that tell us CO2 is bad, and then go film a movie with fires and explosions, cars being driven into lakes and so on.
In this allegedly drought-ravaged part of the world, we are currently enjoying above average rainfall and below-average temperatures. Farmers are facing destruction of crops due to too much rain.
Australia has always been a land of droughts and flooding rains. They come in cycles.
How much desert life was killed by this?
Neil’s comment raises a question for me… seriously. I know natural gas is clean burning, but clean coal is supposed to be clean also. Is natural gas cleaner than clean coal? Seriously. I don’t know. Obviously, both will result in atmospheric CO2, but that isn’t really the question. I am wondering about real pollutants. Does anyone have any numbers?
Just to emphasize the natural variability of the climate in the Broken Hill area (NSW, Australia) where they lit the fires, have a look at this ‘dry arid’ area right now:-
http://www.abc.net.au/news/video/2010/12/01/3082076.htm?site=brokenhill
Neil says:
December 1, 2010 at 4:44 pm
Uh, not so fast – they don’t seem to be advocating pie in the sky solar or wind solutions built from unobtanium here – the plan appears to be to move towards a more decentralized approach, based upon natural gas, so it may not be totally bonkers.
Over-centralization and reliance on single point of failure generation and distribution schemes is one of the major issues not usually discussed with regards to power infrastructure 1.0 (and the modernization of same). Smaller, more distributed generation capabilities would likely be an improvement. Instead of wide swaths of an area losing power during an outage period, it would be more localized. Plus, ‘gas’ can be obtained from other sources than pumping naturally occurring pockets deep underground, plus if burns without many of the really noxious by-products involved with coal, which require extensive and expensive solutions to reduce to tolerable levels.
This one bears a bit of watching, instead of reflexive rock throwing.
Yeah…next thing you know, these eco-nuts will show us how to reduce our consumption by…I don’t know… having wild PARTIES in CANCUN, Mexico, or something……..Oh wait…
I’d like to recommend we start a global event where we all buy 5kgs of coal and burn it in order to bring attention to CO2 release.
350 is 10 degrees shy, maybe if they put 350 and 10:10 together. Nah, they’d just blow something up, set it on fire, or drop it from a plane.
Peter Spencer must be pleased.
Afraid my first thought, seeing picture #2, was not of the Burning Man, but of a much older custom. However, on inspection, I see nobody wearing sheets.
Neil – actually, natural gas is considerably cleaner burning than coal, while the CO2 factor is pretty much a wash it emits a whole lot less of all the other nasty stuff.
A power plant that burns gas is also much easier to maintain, the plant engineers love it – it comes in through a pipe, it goes into the firebox and it burns. No pulverizers, no conveyor belts, no trucks, no train cars, no bits of mine debris screwing up the works.
The only problem from the Oz perspective is they’ve got lots of coal and bugger-all natural gas, so far as I know, so it’d all have to be imported. Maybe I’m wrong.
We are struggling with bush fires in Western Australia at the moment… we had a very warm November, but December is off to a cool start. Currently there is a blaze to the south of Perth causing issues:
http://au.news.yahoo.com/thewest/a/-/newshome/8433779/karnup-firefighters-brace-for-high-winds/
The travesty is that many of these bush fires are started by arsonists.
It should be noted however that the DEC (Department of Environment and Conservation) actually performs prescribed burns on a regular basis to reduce fuel loads in the Jarrah State Forest to the east and southeast of Perth. That way we have light burns from which the vegetation recovers quickly as opposed to uncontrolled heavy burns if loads build up too much… very sensible policy IMO. When you over-preserve the bush and fuel loads build up, the subsequent heavy burns decimate the area for years. Recovery is retarded under those circumstances.
There is some very interesting research on smoke germination BTW. A very tiny proportion (we are talking parts per billion) of chemicals in smoke drastically improve germination of many Australian species. Look up “karrikinolides” and have fun reading. Ironically it is because of research sponsored by companies mining the State Forest that we know as much as we do about such things as karrikinolildes and phytophotera (dieback). Without the mining companies presence there would only be a fraction of the research funding and corresponding understanding of our environment.
racookpe1978 says: …
All what follows is restricted by the IMF, which would rather give money to these country’s dictators than help the poor in these thrid world countries.
If the eco-nuts would allow these poor countries to build coal fired power plants, they wouldn’t need charcoal, clear cutting and forest destruction to stay alive. The farm techniques are some of the most destructive you can use. I don’t deny the poor doing what it takes. Just the fact that no one seems to care what is happening to the rest of the world. Like clear cutting the rain forest to grow palm oil trees for oil substitution
If these very same eco-nuts would allow nuclear power plants, we would all be better off.
And while we are at it, why not allow them to build DDT factories. Malaria has killed over 40 million African children under five in the decaes it was banned for a hoax.
There is lots of good that can be done, by simply allowing poor countries to use modern technology, like electricity. Not rationing of energy for developed countries.
It is an example of how to look really stupid.
Calm down a little folks as we don’t know what they were burning. In the ‘natural’ cycle burning a tree releases CO2 into the atmosphere which is then taken up in the growing of other trees. It’s supposed to be the burning of long locked away carbon in coal and oil that is the problem.
If they used recycled paper/wood it wouldn’t matter. If they used plastic material or such it would.
JEM says:
December 1, 2010 at 6:22 pm
JEM, we do have lots of gas (We sell it as LPG, LNG…) We use some and ship the rest to Asia. I don’t know what the price of the exported stuff is, but I remember that when the exports started the price was a lot lower (by ship) than the domestic use price (piped)
Its probably just me.. but the second photo spells SEX.
(I’ll get me coat)
JC
‘…the drought is over in Australia…’
The extended drought, which was cited as the most potent indication of CAGW and which was predicted by alarmists to continue indefinitely (because that would cause the most widespread alarm and despondency) is most certainly over (except for the SW).
To appreciate just how ‘over’ it is, click through the anomalies (1961-1990) menu:
http://www.bom.gov.au/jsp/awap/rain/index.jsp?colour=colour&time=latest&step=0&map=anomaly&period=month&area=nat
JEM says:
December 1, 2010 at 6:22 pm
Actually Aus has large amounts of natural gas in Bass Strait and the north of Western Aus. It also has large amounts of coal seam gas in Qld and northern NSW. Not much about Sydney or the east coast.
If the fire created some charcoal, it did sequester some carbon. It can take quite a while for charcoal to break down, and it’s likely to break down into black soil rather than all going to the atmosphere.
Personally, what I found odd with the Australian art, compared to the other 350.org art; was it was the only one which actually went out of its way to physically ‘imprint’ its message on the actual land – using earth movers none the less. I would have thought pilling up stones would have been more in keeping (although a very real risk of finding something that would give you nasty bite doing that).
I had an email exchange with the artist concerned, the art was done on ‘degraded’ bush land, and the surrounding area has been seeded to regenerate – so it will eventually disappear. Although given the recent rains there is good chance its already gone.
What was interesting is that his response was cc’ed in with the ceo of 350.org and some collector/art friends – none of them (the artist included) challenged what I said regarding Indonesia and the degradation occurring there in the name of fighting climate change through supposed Co2 reduction.
Regarding distributed gas fired generation search on “blugen”. I’ve nothing to do with the company but I’ve looked at the product and it seems sound, unlike a lot of these things.
Regarding Australia’s weather patterns remember we’re the same size as the cont 48. WA is still desperately short of rainfall, but the Brisbane river was up 6 m (20 ft) down the road from my place for a week while they dumped excess water from the dams recently (after they were only 20% not long ago). Rumour is another dump sooner rather than later. It’s raining more days than not this summer.
Regarding controlled burns I was fighting fires in 93 in sydney. We lost all the outlying buildings and 4 cars at work and 7 houses at the bottom of my street. Firestorms are scary and regular burns do no harm to the enviroment, certainly not as much as the intense firestorms did. Took many years to recover and a lot of nutrients were lost.
It never ceases to amaze me that greenies, most of whom live in the inner city, not only feel they have a right to dictate to country people how they should live but view it as an obligation. It never seems to occur to them that people who go out of their way to live close to nature didn’t do it to lay waste to everything around them, and that all our decades of observation might have yielded a valid view of conservation different from theirs.
The key to understanding of course is that enviromentalism isn’t about saving the enviroment, that’s the excuse. They are really about self gratification. Sigh.
See? I told you, Australia is no longer teh lucky country, it’s no too full of idiots.
At leest we no how to spal proper like.
BTW if you want to see exactly what we face in Australia – see The Rise of the Green Left: Inside the Worldwide Ecosocialist Movement and their yahoo group .
“the drought is over in Australia”
Yes indeed. They come and they go. As Dorothea MacKellar famously penned about 1904, ours is a land of “droughts and flooding rains” (though the first bit is hushed up in alarmist circles these days!). Lovely poem, it is, about a wonderful country.
http://www.lancescoular.com/my-country-by-dorothea-mackellar.html#a
Here’s another epic that says it all: “Said Hanrahan” by John O’Brien composed in 1921. It’s a great read too.
http://www.middlemiss.org/lit/authors/obrienj/poetry/hanrahan.html
Droughts? Here’s our mighty Murray River in their time.
http://home.iprimus.com.au/foo7/droughthistory.html
And to-day? Look at our “arid outback”!
http://www.abc.net.au/local/photos/2010/11/29/3078972.htm?site=brokenhill
It takes all kinds to burn a man. Not everyone at that event is a “filthy eco hippie” though they have tamed it down from back in the days of the drive-by shooting range where you could shoot targets from your car window as you drive by.
Hippies tend not to build stuff like this and live to tell about it:
We could do our own demonstration…. that is, if we cared.
Maybe a Giant “GORE LIED” or “WUWT RULES” or “CLIMATEGATE” visible from space.
Fractals will end the climate debate
http://www.fractalnomics.com/2010/11/breaking-carbon-climate-spell-with.html
Totally aside from every other aspect, I have to say that Burning Man image is spectacular!
& heck if I know why, but it automatically made me think of the really moving 2004 movie, Man on Fire, starring Denzel Washinton.
A counter-org would be nice: 530.org! 530 ppm by 2050! To help all the nice crops and conifers! Warming is good for you! Subsidize CO2! Coal is King, Wind Blows! Oil Excels, Solar Sucks!
It’ll be lotsa fun. 😀
This is old hat. Commercial airliners from Perth to Adelaide reach the Bight about the Archipeligo of the Recherche. Just before there, in the early 1980s, a farmer had scraped some letters with a bulldozer. Can’t recall what the word was, could be wrong, but have a memory of “SHELL”.
The Aboriginal people of Aus used to set fire to the leaf litter to keep the ground clear for hunting and some of the gum trees can only shed seed after fires. So fire has been a part of the environment for longer than we’ve been building houses in the woods. In LA they planted gum and pine trees around the houses built on the Hollywood hills both of which are very resinous and drop lots of leaf litter just what you need around your house.
James
re post by; Ron Cram says: December 1, 2010 at 5:36 pm
Ron, ‘clean coal’ doesn’t exist yet. At this point, or at least as of very very recently, it was still theoretical or at least nowhere near commercial yet. Now, don’t get me wrong – in 1st world nations (or at least the USA, but I think pretty much all of them) years ago all sorts of things were changed or added to coal fired plants that did a tremendous job of reducing the gaseous and particulate releases – using low sulfur coal, scrubbers, etc.
These sorts of things aren’t what is meant by ‘clean coal,’ however, which refers primarily (completely?) to methods to capture and sequester coal plant CO2 emissions.
JC says:
December 1, 2010 at 7:20 pm
Its probably just me.. but the second photo spells SEX.
There was an ink blot psychologist here who showed a pateient a randon series of blots. The patient replied that each one was about SEX. The shrink accused the patient of being obsessed and needinmg help. The patient angrily replied, “Not me, mate. It’s you. You are the who keeps drawing the dirty pictures”.
re post by; Wind Rider says: December 1, 2010 at 5:38 pm
Wind Rider, I don’t know about other nations, although I’d suspect it’s similar, but in the US widespread power outages aren’t because of generation single point failure or distribution schemes. The problem is one of unbalanced power loads. When you have one area go down (often a blown transformer or something like that), you can wind up with either too much or too little load on other parts of the distribution grid. When that happens, areas shut down automatically to prevent further damage to the system. If you get an overload in particular, and shutdowns don’t occur as they should or a smidge too slowly, you wind up blowing out other transformers or equipment and get a cascading failure.
Going with smaller, disconnected systems as you mention would probably wind up being worse, not better. Why? Because sure, then you avoid the rare cascade failures, but the entire area goes down goes down instead. With a larger grid, you have many different sources online, and many different pathways the electricity can follow – so you get a lot fewer failures and they’re typically limited to much smaller areas also. If a plant goes down or comes off grid unexpectedly – or for planned maintenance, a large grid can absorb the change and make up for the difference. Because you’ve got a grid, electricity can probably be routed into many areas that would otherwise be without power – often times people haven’t got a clue that a plant went down or a transformer blew, because the grid can distribute and make up the load from other sources.
The smaller your grid, the less it will be able to absorb over or under loading – and the more likely the whole thing blows or shuts itself down to keep from equipment damage. Also, the more likely you have to provide far more total generation capacity – back up in case a plant goes down. Large grid, and other plants can take up the load if needed, so you don’t have to maintain nearly as much redundant backup producing ability (e.g., fewer plants can safely cover more people). Electricity isn’t directional down the wires – it goes whichever way it is drawn, so balancing the load is the key.
This means effectively the bigger and more interconnected the grid the better, safer, cheaper, and more reliable the entire system is – provided of course that fail safes are put in to allow quick shutdown/disconnect from troubled areas – which is how modern systems are designed.
re: crosspatch says: December 1, 2010 at 11:00 pm
…Hippies tend not to build stuff like this and live to tell about it: [megavolt]
I wanna play with his toys!!! (thanks crosspatch, I am now suffering from a serious case of Van De Graff envy)
JEM says:
December 1, 2010 at 6:22 pm
Loads of gas, up to 125 years’ supply at 2002 consumption levels. We ship it to China in special boats. Yet another reason why Oz has the strongest economy in the world right now: coal, iron, sugar, and gas!
There is no such thing as “clean coal.” It’s a fiction repeated by know-nothings like Barack Obama. Coal contains a great deal of sulfur and trace amounts of toxic metals, like mercury. http://pubs.usgs.gov/bul/b1823/append.htm
The sulfur goes out the stack and the metals are concentrated in the ash. I know of no way to remove sulfur or trace elements other than burning. The sulfur can be scrubbed before before it leaves the stack at significant expense, but there is no way to reduce the trace metals.
Having said that, most eco-terrorists are actually talking about the CO2 released; that’s what they want to stop. It’s ridiculous and that’s why the Obama administration is spending millions on research.
http://www.popularmechanics.com/science/energy/coal-oil-gas/4339171
Actually, fire DOES eliminate CO2 from the atmosphere. It goes like this:
CO2 is taken out of the air to make cellulose. One day the tree catches on fire. Much of the carbon taken out of the air is returned via CO2 … but not all. A good bit can remain as charcoal. Charcoal is very stable and can last for tens of thousands of years in the soil. So any time a forest burns, a considerable amount of carbon is converted to a very stable form that is kept out of the atmosphere for a very long time.
That is one of those “nice to know” facts that is probably of little value because there is no evidence that atmospheric CO2 is harmful anyway.
Parts of Australia have, within human time span, been hot, dry and arid. Present climate of the same type in the same area does not prove climate problems. Australia has the same problem as parts of SW America in that a dry region become popular to live because of the climate and too much water is drawn from groundwater supplies making the problem of hot/arid worse.
re post by: DCC says: December 2, 2010 at 12:42 am
Huh? DCC, I’m not saying anything here re practicality/cost, but there are a number of ways with varying degrees of success, both pre- and post-burning, for both sulfur and trace metals. Things like wet scrubbers and electrostatic precipitators popped to mind first for me, but they’re far from all that can be used.
Take a read here: http://www.fossil.energy.gov/programs/powersystems/pollutioncontrols/overview_mercurycontrols.html
So essentially a group of concerned well meaning do-gooders who believe the imminent anthropogenic destruction of our planets climate and therefor nature as we supposedly know it, get it into their potheads that it is a terrificly hilariously good idea to, on the one case anthropogenically make changes to the soil and nature in such a large scale project that their puny tag becomes visible from a great length and a high altitude, and on the other case, acting like crazed solar worshipers of old hopping around burning stuff in great blazes of fire-tags and symbolically burning man (themselves?).
Are those 350 hippies former members of the KKK?
JEM:The only problem from the Oz perspective is they’ve got lots of coal and bugger-all natural gas, so far as I know, so it’d all have to be imported. Maybe I’m wrong.
sorry, you are wrong:-) we have Heaps! of natural gas, our bus fleets and taxis run on LNG as do a lot of dual fuel cars for years. we export far to much to china.
and we are now having prime Qld farmland invaded by a chinese owned Frakking for coal seam gas event:-(
I want to know why the DSE hasnt got this mob in court for destroying native veg, disturbing the land near waterways, and starting fires OUT of the fire season.
all of the above are being used on farmers in Aus daily to control and ruin their livelihood!
‘What’s the best way promote reducing CO2 causing combustion?’
Use Oxygen causing combustion. It works better.
Sorry, Anthony. I had to do the play on word thing.
Is it just me or does the three numeral look distinctly phallic? Makes sense I suppose since they are trying their best to shaft us all…
In order to create that fire design and get a photo, they would have needed an accelerant of some kind. Chidzey does like to play with fire to create his “Chidzart”:
http://blip.tv/file/1346112/
Fire is a powerful symbol in most religions. In Christianity for example, God manifests himself as a pillar of fire. This is just one more example of how the Belief in manmade climate whatever resembles a type of twisted religion.
Further, every dead tree now “decaying naturally” emits the same mass of CO2 (just a bit slower) that burning emits. Forest fires are a natural requirement of forests.
Actually, burning dead trees is better environmentally than allowing slow decomposition. Termites produce methane, 16X as potent a GHG as CO2 (albiet alledgely short lived).
Law of unintended ecowacko consequences at work.
I just couldn’t believe the Aussy who told me that all the wackos and nut-cases from California and Hawaii were moving to the Great DownUnder Continent and most of them were government administrators and educators. I guess I should have!
PS: Birth control pill failures seem to have an “environmental” aspect.
What’s the best way promote reducing CO2 causing combustion?
A delicious Barbecue!!
Is this Australia the one that exports millions of tons of coal each year principally to China and Japan?
******
DCC says:
December 2, 2010 at 12:42 am
The sulfur goes out the stack and the metals are concentrated in the ash. I know of no way to remove sulfur or trace elements other than burning. The sulfur can be scrubbed before before it leaves the stack at significant expense, but there is no way to reduce the trace metals.
******
That’s exactly what electrostatic precipitators do — sequester the fly-ash. The fly-ash & trace-metals are impounded in a dedicated land-fill that is lined with an impermeable barrier underneath to prevent water-leaching. True, the tiny amounts of mercury prb’ly are vaporized & escape, but big deal. Wet-scrubbers prb’ly remove even most of that.
When someone (or a government/culture) continue worrying about ever-tinier trace amounts of “substance X”, it’s called an obsessive-compulsive disorder.
According to BOM regarding Australian droughts:
So it seems as if the recent drought was part of a cycle and nothing out of the ordinary and in any case it’s mostly over while temperatures have got ‘hotter’ etc.
Ref – Spen says:
December 2, 2010 at 7:13 am
“Is this Australia the one that exports millions of tons of coal each year principally to China and Japan?”
________________________
No, that’s the Good Australia. This is the Bad Australia with all the idiots who want to live like it was 14,000BC.
Darren Parker
December 1, 2010 at 4:32 pm
I’m switching from electrical heating to a wood fire this winter because electricity is now too expensive.
###
In the Peoples Republic of Kalifornia, many cities have made wood fire heating illegal!
I’ve just had a brilliant idea..!
Instead of ‘burying’ CO2 – or whatever the latest hairbrained scheme is – why not have giant fans BLOWING it at all these stoopid wind turbines..? The fans could be powered by the clean coal power stations..
Oh – I feel a Nobel prize coming on….
I often wonder about the government here forcing the closure of coal plants in the US. I work in the sheetrock business, and the main ingredient is gypsum. Way back when they decided to eliminate the real pollution from coal burning (mostly sulfur compounds), the byproduct of scrubbing the gases is synthetic gypsum. Our company decided to try using it way back when, and found it worked great for sheetrock (plus back then the power companies used to pay us to take it since it cost them substantially to landfill it). It required a little bit of equipment rework because its a little denser than natural gypsum, but the purity is very high, and very consistent as well. Because of this flue gas scrubbing, pretty much the only thing that exits into the atmosphere is steam and CO2.
Not all of our plants use this resource yet, as most of the older ones are built on top of gypsum deposits that they either quarry or mine. But most of the new ones we have built, especially in the eastern US are built near power plants instead of gypsum deposits.
So if the brilliant eco people succeed in banning coal, we will lose this resource that is a byproduct of generating energy in the first place. Then we (and our competitors), will need to go back to mining, which uses even more energy to produce and eco people hate even more.
If you live out east, and have an office or home built in the last 15 years, you most likely have walls made from byproducts of burning coal.
A neighbour of mine grows a fine show of Namaqualand Daisies (Dimorphotheca sinuata) in his front garden. They are indigenous to the drier areas of the Western Cape and as it is much wetter here in coastal Natal, they are too fiddlesome for me to grow. Quite apart from the climate not being ideal as they hail from dry mountainous areas, one needs to give them a good burning in the winter if one wants the very best performance from them. The same is true of many other flowers hailing from both the western and eastern capes. Feinbos is the description for these types of plants. They have evolved long before man was around to set fires and there are all too many townsmen who do not apprehend that fire is a natural phenomenom. Every time that wildfire in Australia makes the news, I read that the police are looking for the arsonists and I wonder if there is no natural fire at the antipodes.
Just waiting for them to come back from Can-Con (cantcon?) announcing that “We have to destroy the environment in order to preserve it” or something like that…
Australian drought cycles are in tune with ocean oscillations (eg: the PDO).
Wind power is unsustainable with an EROEI of 0.29.
350 should get with the program: it is planetary mechanics which causes solar cycles (ie: Schwabe, Gleissberg, 370-yr, 2402-yr, etc.), which results in our climate cycles. CO2 is irrelevant.
Roy Martin says:
December 1, 2010 at 5:36 pm
Just to emphasize the natural variability of the climate in the Broken Hill area (NSW, Australia) where they lit the fires, have a look at this ‘dry arid’ area right now:-
http://www.abc.net.au/news/video/2010/12/01/3082076.htm?site=brokenhill
huh, we call those floods on the side of the planet.
someone tell george he can come film in my parts…plenty of desert and he won’t have to build large sets… the towns in the nevada desert already look like the apocalypse!
whoever posted up dr. megavolt, thanks! close to a rockstar as you get at burning man. haven’t seen him on the playa in several years, but then i quit going a few years back because it got too tame. I miss the days of the drive by shooting range – now it’s all safety-first, idiot and cop friendly – i call it the largest LE fundraiser in the nevada
so much for freedom and self expression. at least larry harvey and nevada LE are making a ton of money.
A small number of individuals or employers would be careless enough to want to set themselves or work colleagues in jeopardy so hiring an electrical company is a perfect way of ensuring that a high quality professional job is done.
“Roy Martin says:
December 1, 2010 at 9:14 pm”
Ok, I may not spell correctly all the time but I don’t swallow the AGW tripe most Australians accept. Ok, I forget, Australians don’t care what thier politicians inflict upon them…tax tax tax! If you are an Australian, peek outside your sporting sunnies and have a look at what YOUR leaders are doing and have been doing for many decades.
Or will it be another case of she’ll be right, right? And then it’ll be too late….
Clearly these geoglyphs were made by and for space aliens, ala crop circles and the Nazca Lines. The aliens look like humans, but don’t be fooled. They want to eat you.
Well, where I come from Engineering is called “Applied Science”, actually doing something with scientific knowledge.
That takes integration not staying in the ivory tower. A big problem in “climate science” is lack of integration, a bigger one is “better than others” attitude of people like Andrew Weaver who tried to redefine science to exclude critics (reference letter from he and colleagues, Innovation magazine January-February 2010 issue, available from http://www.apeg.bc.ca).
Applied Science takes checking that the result works, in the real world not Plato’s other one that ideologies like Marxism think exists.
And I note that David Harriman’s book “The Logical Leap”, section on Newton, in making points about what I call the theoretical approach versus induction starting from facts, rings a bell in my mind that there are word problems in the field. The theoretical approach, which seems to be favoured by climate alarmists, may use words like “first cause” and “first principles” but they aren’t referring to facts in reality. The benign version is deduction – one might figure out an electrical question by going back to power=emf times current, for example, the formula having been developed by induction (it seems to me).
Of course attention and care is always essential – watching for anomalies for example, and being able to deal with them (“skeptics” in the broad sense – not the “I’m from Missouri” sense – are disabled by uncertainty, rationalists don’t care as their way will always give the “truth”). (In their warped mind, beware that “truth” has become an abused word today, theorists and true believers (who don’t even do much thinking, theorists do just very badly).
That comes from Plato’s error in understanding the human mind’s use of concepts – he went down the fatal path of deciding there must be two “worlds” – the unknowable one we live in and the knowable one somewhere else (the path to knowing it is some kind of [spiritual] effort to cleanse one’s mind of what I’d call reality – an approach ripe for exploitation by ivory tower types who can claim they are the only path to knowledge). I know, it is bizarre, but so are most belief systems when you examine their fundamentals – and some philosophers do get to the point in old age that they say something like “my approach is the right one but you can’t live that way”.